Category Archives: Poems about Grumpy People

Every conversation is a quest two people enterfrom opposite directions to converge at its center.The hard part of the journey commences with their greeting—an intricate endeavor not completed with first meeting.

With each new associate, we visit a new land.With each conversation, our horizons expandinto lands exotic, tragic or entertaining.Perhaps enemy territory—often with no training.

Do we take umbrage with their words or enter, unprotesting,the world that they offer—experimenting, testingnew mental mountains, jungles where vivid birds might call,beckoning us onwards, or do we meet a wall

that offers us no access—sealed up, rigid, cold—closed to all explorers, nearly obscured with mold?What journeys do we offer ourselves to those we meet?Do we offer easy access or promise sure defeat?

Life was designed for journeying. Daily, new vacations.Some conversations novels and others mere quotations.Some trips an experience you wouldn’t choose again—just another whistle stop on life’s commuter train.

I do not like the bucket list, in fact I just abhor it
even though I know the masses tend to just adore it.
Anything where many rush to jump onto a wagon,
makes my skin crawl and alerts my impulse to start gaggin’.
I like originality in labeling my wants.
I do not even like to visit trendy restaurants.
And so to ask me to record my bucket list for you,
let alone prioritize, choosing one or two
to brag about as though the label “bucket list” is clever,
makes me want to find a guillotine and pull the lever!

I have no list of what I want to do before I go.
I only have the wish to still maintain the status quo
by staying healthy and alert and doing every day
precisely what I want to as I make my way
toward the final hour and toward my final minute.
I simply want to live my life with me securely in it!
Sound of mind and active, engaged with other folks
without becoming fodder for younger people’s jokes.
Not the fogie sitting safely in her lair
bibbed and drugged and senile in the pen of elder care.

I want to end my time on earth devoid of tear or sigh
sitting at a table drinking rum and eating pie!!!

The Prompt: Whimsical Creature—This week, write a whimsical, nonsensical poem about a creature you’ve dreamt up. Try to let go of the meanings associated with the words you use every day when describing this creature. Instead, use words as springboards for weird associations, as colors in a vast mural. Let your mind run wild and hang on for the ride.

Shooing with Tongue on the Tongue of a Shoe

There once was a grouch named McPeevish McPue
who spent his whole life on the tongue of a shoe
where he shooed away flintocks* and floogles* and stuff.
As a matter of fact, he would get downright rough.

He would beat them with bagels and flog them with floggles
from the foot of their feet to the top of their toggles.
Then he bopped them again every minute or two
till those flintocks and floogles were beat black and blue.

But they just wouldn’t leave until McPue had sung
a rock-a-bye ballad with only one lung.
Then they leapt and they lithered until they were gung.
Now McPeevish McPue only shoos with his tongue!

*Floogles: fairy folk who get even with grouches by spraying foot odor into their shoes daily.
*Flintocks: I’m not completely sure what flintocks are, other than the fact that they drive McPeevish McPue crazy. I’m counting on my readers to tell me more about them.